Frederick W Gibbs

Digital Humanities Projects

As Director of Digital Scholarship at RR-CHNM, I write grants for and direct a wide variety digital history projects sponsored by numerous funding agencies (NEH, NSF, Sloan, and Mellon, etc).

Reframing the Victorians

With funding from one of twelve Google Digital Humanities Grants, Dan Cohen and I are exploring the massive corpus of Victorian literature held at Google Books in order to reevaluate and complicate the traditional stereotypical characterizations of the Victorians. The vast digital library of Google Books presents for the first time the possibility that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing—not just the well-known Mills and Carlyles, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even forgotten authors—to see if the Victorians truly did use the kinds of words and phrases that Houghton in his seminal The Victorian Frame of Mind thought were indicative of their character. Did metaphors of light actually increase in real terms between 1830 and 1870, or was this only true for the dozen prominent writers he chose to focus on in his chapter on optimism? Will a more complex picture emerge from the comprehensive index of Google Books as we study changing word use over time? (with Dan Cohen, CHNM).

Digging Into Data: Criminal Intent

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey provide a glimpse into over 200k trials at London’s central criminal court over a period of 240 years. Historians have tended to approach this collection by sifting through the documents one at a time, using unusual or compelling stories to illustrate social, cultural or intellectual histories. The Criminal Intent project demonstrates the potential roles for text mining in historical practice, showing that greater historical rigor can be achieved, and new insights gained, by moving from a single trial or narrow run of relevant examples to an analysis of statistically significant textual patterns found in this source as a single, massive whole. In addition to the Old Bailey Proceedings, our work builds on the successes of Zotero virtual collections, TAPoR and Voyeur analytics.

Metadata Improvement VIA Mapping (MIVIAM)

Creating digital ad-hoc maps for historical research has never been easier, yet the historian faces a number of practical problems when visualizing data in space and time. Messy, non-standardized data as well as shifting historical placenames and political boundaries, to name just a few, complicate the process considerably. This project extends a prototype (initially funded by the Mellon Foundation) to make it even easier to map historical data and clean it up in the process. MIVIAM geolocates placenames and creates a KML file so that the information contained in the database can be readily mapped and visualized. More importantly, MIVIAM's rich user interface facilitates metadata correction by researchers. By allowing users to map specific sets of data—about which they have expertise—they can easily recognize and correct problems with metadata, thus improving their maps for individual research, but also making the data much more useful for everyone else at the same time. (with Gregg Mitman, UW-Madison, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga, UC-Santa Barbara)

ScholarPress

Most online education tools remain far too closed, proprietary, and complex for most of the essential tasks that scholars need to do on a daily basis. This project with create a suite of focused plug-ins for the ubiquitous blogging platform Wordpress to help humanities teachers and researchers create syllabi, course websites, and display bibliographies. The primary goal is to provide freedom, flexibility, and a low-barrier to entry to using technology in teaching and research without the restrictions of monolithic, expensive, and proprietary software.

Projects in Development

Mapping Materia Medica

This project proposes to create and encourage use of a collaborative workspace to help scholars catalog and cross-reference the myriad materia medica of the medieval and early modern worlds. The many languages, transliterations, name variants, and varieties of contexts in which plant names appear, make traditional print publications wholly unsuitable for a developing a comprehensive and enduring concordance. Instead, such a project requires new tools and methods to allow scholars working with these materials (and who have the expertise to decipher them) to connect data about them. A collective and interdisciplinary effort will help us understand how scientific and medical knowledge of plants and their uses were influenced by their traversing geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. It will extend modern herbaria backward to gain a much more comprehensive view of natural history.

Tracing Medieval Knowledge Flows

As the Greco-Arabic learned tradition was translated into Latin via a few translation centers, it spread rapidly through burgeoning universities and other centers of learning. New textual discoveries and intellectual frameworks fueled knowledge production at increasing rates. Scholars of early universities, intellectual historians, and anyone interested in the transfer of knowledge and knowledge networks have asked many questions about the big picture of late medieval learning. But traditional scholarship tends to disperse and confine its analysis of libraries, university statutes, and individual scholars to rather inaccessible scholarly monographs. As a result, we really have no bird's-eye view of textual transmission during this crucial period of intellectual growth that was foundational for the modern West. This project attempts to visualize the textual history of the period in order to get new perspectives that traditional humanities scale research cannot.

Publications

• "Critical Discourse in the Digital Humantiies" Journal of the Digital Humanities 1.1 (2012).
• "The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing," in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (eds.), Writing History in the Digtal Age. (with Trevor Owens) [forthcoming Spring 2012]
• "A Conversation with Data: Prospecting Victorian Words and Ideas," Victorian Studies 54.1 (2011). (with Dan Cohen)
• "New Textual Traditions From Community Transcription," Digital Medievalist 7 (2011).
• "Building Better Tools in the Digital Humanities," Digital Humanities Quarterly (with Trevor Owens). [forthcoming]
• Review of Ian Mortimer, The Dying and the Doctors: the Medical Revolution in Seventeenth Century England. Journal of Social History, Summer 2011
• “Natural History.” in Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert E. Bjork. Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 2010.
• Review of Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Anthony Grafton. In Pharmacy in History, September 2009.
• “Poison Libels.” in Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, ed. Joseph P. Byrne. Greenwood Press, September 2008.

Selected Fellowships

• Humanities Exposed (HEX) Scholar at the UW Center for the Humanities (2008)
• Dissertator Fellowship from UW Graduate School (2007)
• John Neu Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship from UW Hist. of Sci. Dept. (2007)
• Research Award from the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (2007)
• Paul Klemperer Fellowship from the New York Academy of Medicine (2006)
• National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (2005-06)
• Heckman Research Grant from the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (2005)
• Vilas Travel Grant from the UW Graduate School (2005)

Technical Highlights

• 12+ years experience with small and large scale programming projects integrating various web technologies, including PHP, Javascript, HTML, XML, XSLT, XUL, AJAX, CSS, MySQL, REST APIs.
• Broad knowledge and experience implementing web standards, accessibility guidelines, database design, and semantic mark-up. Adapted and customized open-source projects to client needs.
• 8+ years of web design experience creating harmony between user interfaces and information structures.
• Extensive experience providing technical advice and consultations for humanities scholars and projects, creating documentation, and formulating plans for long-term sustainability.

Previous Web Programming and Design Projects